Sunday, February 27, 2011

One of the moments that is almost completely missing in all the discussions about the future platform for connected devices, m2m applications etc. – development tools. Who and how will implement all the futuristic scenarios? Here is a presentation from BCFIC 2011 - Future platform for internet of things

Saturday, February 26, 2011

"When you have to deal with a large amount of data to be operated on mySQL databases, the performance can be dramatically improved using a few simple tweaks.

First of all you have to use Statement.addBatch/executeBatch instead of simple execute methods. For each added batch, the jdbc driver will store in local memory and when the executeBatch is invoked, all the batches are sent at once to the database. This will result in an huge speed improvement." - see details of JDBC performance tuning here.

Friday, February 25, 2011

"New York City’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today announced the use of Quick Response or QR codes on building permits, to provide New Yorkers with easy access to information related to buildings and construction sites throughout the city" - from here

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Our mashup Tips and forums has been updated. Lets you see and discuss the latest tips from Foursquare users. Google Maps + Disqus + Foursquare. And you can copy interesting places (addresses) right to your mobile via Geo Messages

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Yahoo is developing an internal cloud-serving engine to boost its own productivity, and intends to release the code as an open source this year.

"We're committed to open-sourcing all of our cloud infrastructure, for the simple reason that we don't believe the cloud infrastructure is a competitive differentiator for us," says Todd Papaioannou, Yahoo's vice president of cloud architecture. "I have this question pop up from time to time, 'Is Yahoo ever going to move into the cloud?' And the answer is, 'No. We are the cloud.'" - from here.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Our Geo messages project has been updated. Lets you share location info on the peer to peer basic as a signature to the standard messages (email, SMS).

Lets us repeat here the main idea. It is obvious, that the question "where are you" is one of the most often asked during the communications. 600 billion text messages per year in the US ask "where are you?" – as per Location Business Summit 2010 data. A huge amount of mobile services is actually being built around this question so their main feature is user’s location exchange. In the most cases it is implemented as the ability for the mobile user (mobile phone owner) write down own location info in the some special place (special mobile application). But it means of course, that user must be registered in location-sharing service (e.g. download some special application). And what is even more important – everyone who needs this information must use the same service too.

Typically we have now two models for location sharing in services. At the first hand it is passive location monitoring and future access to the accumulated data trough some API. It is Google Latitude for example.
Possible problems are privacy - some third party tool is constantly monitoring my location and what is more important – saves it on the some external server as well as the shorted life time for handset’s battery.

Another popular model for location sharing are check-in procedures in the various forms. Check-in could be an active (e.g. Foursquare), when user directly sets his/her current location or passive (e.g. Twitter) when location info could be added to the current message (status). But here we can see not only privacy issue - all my friends/followers can see my location but also a noise issue – my location info could be actually interested only for the physical friends. For the majority of followers my location info (e.g. Foursquare status in Twitter time line) is just a noise.

Our idea of the signed geo messages service (geo mail, geo sms) based on the adding user’s location info to the standard messages like SMS or email. Just as a signature. So with this service for telling somebody "where I am" it would be just enough to send him/her a message. And your partner does not need to use any additional service in order to get information about your location. He/she will simply read SMS or email.

It is obviously peer to peer sharing and does not require any social network. Our location signature has got a form of the link to some mobile map with the marker at the shared location. And what is important here – the map itself has no information about the sender and recipient. That information exists only in the message itself. The map (marker) has no information about the creator for example. That is all about privacy.

There are several implementations for this approach: mobile web mashups (HTML5), mobile web widgets, Java Card applets for legacy phones, JME midlet for mobile Java phones as well as solutions for web applications.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Our project QRpon has been updated. It offers a new approach for advertising in the social networks.

Qrpon is a specialized CMS that lets any business create a mobile web site for delivering coupons, gifts, discounts etc. And mobile users will get benefits in exchange for posting business related data (business-defined info) in the social network.

For example, mobile site that offers some discount for a particular product. Mobile user enters web site, accepts an offer, confirms his/her Facebook ID and some business related data will be post on his/her wall. In exchange for this post user will get a confirmation screen that could be presented to the business staff as a confirmation for benefits claim.

No special registration, no downloaded applications. Just a mobile Internet. Any HTML5 browser (iPhone, Android, Samsung etc.).

And mobile site could be easily presented on-site with QR-code. It is also created by our CMS (here the name QRpon comes from).

So why business should deliver benefits in exchange for Foursquare checkin for example? Why do not create own "checkin" site and deliver benefits in exchange for posting business-defined data (not Foursquare-defined)?

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Last month Google released a paper on its high availability datastore Megastore. Megastore "blends the scalability of a NoSQL datastore with the convenience of a traditional RDBMS in a novel way, and provides both strong consistency guarantees and high availability," the paper says. Megastore is the technology behind Google's High Replication Datastore. - from here

Java servlets filter lets you log error pages from your web application into server's log. So as soon as your application executes any error page (JSP attribute errorPage=true) its content will be automatically added to the system log - see Log error filter from JSOS

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

The most delicious from our mashups has been updated. Get an idea about your next lunch right from Twitter. Mashup Food from Twitter shows you the live stream of food pictures just published in Twitter. See what other people are eating right now.

Friday, February 04, 2011

Our mashup Protected notes has been updated. Lets you create and share (twitter, email, facebook) password protected text notes (remarks). The idea is to let you share private notes via the public sources. For example, update your Twitter status (public account) so the only selected readers will be able to read that. And authorized users can delete notes.

This new version supports HTTP API also. Now you can create the password protected text notes right from your applications via the simple HTTP request.
Also you can directly add to your dynamic pages links to this mashup with the pre-populated text (a-la 'share this', 'twit this' etc.). The format for the hyperlink is this:

"Cisco anticipates that in 2015, the average mobile user will consume 1,118 megabytes of traffic per month. So tiered pricing, pricing that ignores the reality of consuming more data at faster speeds, and possibly limits on what one can download in cheaper plans are all likely to make an appearance." - from gigaom

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Our mashup Social Graph Directory has been updated. Lets you present your Social Graph info (friend’s data) in the simple tabular form. Do you have contacts in particular company, city etc. Also lets you see additional info about your friends (whois for Facebook). And in this new version you can find classmates info too.